Eye-Fi Explore 2 GB Wi-Fi SD Flash Memory Card EYE-FI-2EX (OLD VERSION)

by Eye-Fi

Product Details

• Item Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B001ACXHXE
• Item model number: EYE-FI-2EX
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: May 27, 2008

Product Description

Manufacturer Product Description

Manufacturer Product Description A Wireless Memory Card? Yes, there really is Wi-Fi inside that tiny little card. It's going to change the way you take, save and share photos.

It makes your camera a Wi-Fi camera. Upload your photos automatically.

Photos shouldn't be trapped in your camera. Set them free effortlessly and wirelessly. The Eye-Fi Card is a wireless SD memory card for your digital camera. It stores pictures like a standard SD memory card, but also uses your Wi-Fi network to automatically upload images from inside your camera to your PC or Mac. No cables, no cradles, no fuss. It also neatly organizes your photo uploads by date in the folder you choose.

Key Features

• Unlimited Geotagging
• Wi-Fi Hotspot Access for 1 year
• Unlimited WebShare Service
• Wireless Uploads to Computer
• 2 GB of storage

Eye-Fi Explore is for those who tag or organize, for those who blog or share in real-time, for those who need to upload here, there or somewhere else, and all the rest who are simply passionate about managing, sharing and saving their memories.
It uploads photos wirelessly to your computer and to the web, of course. But, Eye-Fi Explore also automatically adds geographic location labels to your photos and allows you to upload from more than 10,000 Wi-Fi hotspots across the nation. Your memories will be easier to search and more fun to share with geo tags, and you'll be able to upload them on the go.

How it works

Geotagging

With Geotagging, your photos will be automatically labeled, or tagged, to show where they were taken. Today, tags make searching for photos easier and make sharing them more meaningful, but it's a time-consuming and manual process. With Eye-Fi's Geotagging Service, you won't have to spend your time entering the info. It's done for you when you upload your photo.

Using its built-in Wi-Fi, the Eye-Fi Card locates any surrounding Wi-Fi networks as you take pictures. Then, the Eye-Fi Service translates that data into geographic location and adds the information to each picture (in the EXIF data) as it is delivered to the web or your computer. It's as easy as that. You snap the shot and the photo shows up labeled with the city and state in which it was taken. The coverage area is expanding all the time, as new Wi-Fi access points appear and as the location of those wireless networks are mapped and added to the system. Today, in North America, about 70 percent of the populated areas have been mapped. In Europe, the top 50 metropolitan areas are covered, along with 70 percent of the populated areas in Germany, France and the UK. Coverage is expanding in Western Europe as well as several areas of Asia, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan and other countries. Certain online photo sites already support geotagging and even have visualization tools that let you map your memories. Check out Flickr, Picasa and SmugMug to see what geotagging can do. Many desktop photo management programs also make good use of geotags as well, including Adobe's Photoshop Elements 6 (PC only), Google's Picasa (PC only), Ovolabs Geophoto (mac only) and Microsoft's Pro Photo Tools (PC only). Eye-Fi Explore includes unlimited Geotagging.

HotSpot Access

With Hotspot Access, you'll be able to upload from more than 10,000 Wayport Wi-Fi hotspots across the US just as easily as at home. You don't need to have your laptop with you or even have an account with the hotspot provider. Your photos will be delivered to your photo-sharing website and to your computer, even if it's thousands of miles away.

To make this possible and easy, Eye-Fi has worked directly with hotspot provider Wayport. Wayport offers Wi-Fi access at thousands of locations, including most McDonald's restaurants, major hotels, airports, and other locales. To see a map of all the locations in the US, click here. An Eye-Fi Card with Hotspot Access already includes access to Wayport hotspots. Simply walk into a Wayport location and turn on your camera. Your Eye-Fi Card will recognize the network, connect to it and start uploading your photos while you have a burger or wait for your flight. If you want to be informed about your uploads, you can choose to receive status updates from Eye-Fi as either email or SMS messages. We'll let you know when you've connected to a supported hotspot network and are uploading and we'll let you know when your upload is finished. And, like all Eye-Fi uploads, if you leave the location before your upload is finished, it will pick up right where it left off the next time you're in a supported location. Eye-Fi Explore includes 1 year of Wayport Hotspot Access. Eye-Fi Explore users will be able to renew Hotspot Access for $19 per year after the first year.

WebShare

With WebShare, your photos can be automatically uploaded to your favorite photo sharing, printing, blogging or social networking website. No wasted time sitting in front of your computer. No fussing with upload software. No delay in sharing your new memories with friends and family. Choose from among more than 20 of the most popular websites and some up-and-comers too. You can upload images privately and

control if and when they are viewable by others. Many sites even let you edit your photo albums online. And, you can change your preferred upload site at any time. You can even upload to the Web when your computer is turned off. The Eye-Fi Share and The Eye-Fi Explore will upload your photos directly to the Eye-Fi Service through your home Wi-Fi network. We'll deliver them to your photo site and then deliver them to your computer the next time you turn it on. The Eye-Fi Service is secure and encrypted, so your data and photos are safe and private. Eye-Fi Share and Eye-Fi Explore include unlimited WebShare service. Upload and share all you want.

Product Description

M1) Eye-Fi explore - 2GB wireless

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I love this device!, July 15, 2008

By 

J. Moore "hierophant" (Garden of Earthly Delights) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Eye-Fi Explore 2 GB Wi-Fi SD Flash Memory Card EYE-FI-2EX (OLD VERSION) (Personal Computers)

So, I'm the kind of guy who takes a million pictures of the kids and then they sit in my digital camera for 6 months. This device is perfect for me. Just snap away and then turn my camera on for a few minutes at home or in a Wi-Fi enabled McDonald's - bingo!

Take it out of the box, plug it into a USB port with the handy plug, and take about 4 minutes to set it up. It just works like a breeze.

Geotagging works perfectly for me. If it doesn't work for you, you can actually go in and set up the location of your routers so that it will work. The reviewer who complained about this could have spent about 2 minutes and fixed this issue.

I have my account set up to automatically post my photos to Flickr as well as downloading them to a directory on my PC. The Eye-Fi supports probably 10-12 of the most popular photo sharing sites.

The only thing on my wish list is for the card to upload video I take with my digital camera (right now only jpg file format is supported). I contacted support and they confirmed they are getting a lot of requests for that feature - so it may be on its way sometime.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 5.0 out of 5 stars Easily and Wirelessly Transfers your Photos!!, August 29, 2008

By 

Natalie Kilpatrick (Omaha, NE) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Eye-Fi Explore 2 GB Wi-Fi SD Flash Memory Card EYE-FI-2EX (OLD VERSION) (Personal Computers)

This is the best new product I have ever seen! This card works perfectly with many of my SD cameras completely rendering cables useless!!

First off, the registration. A quick and simple registration (which you must have an internet connection for) helps you register the Eye-Fi Card with Eye-Fi's server to prevent unauthorized users from using *your* Eye-Fi Card. During the registration process, you also set up your wireless network (with your personal wireless DHCP enabled router), which works with Open, WEP or WPA encryption. It sends a test packet to the Eye-Fi Server, and once it verifies it's arrival, BAM! Your wireless network is set up. The next two are setting up your photo sharing accounts, personally, I use Webshots, and also directing your photos where to save on your computer. After that, you slap your Eye-Fi Card in your camera, take a picture and wammo! The picture is on the hard drive and on the photo sharing web site!

With so many new features added in the past few months, like geotagging and hotspot access on the Explore Card, this has become a necessity for anyone who uses a digital camera on a regular basis. I have not noticed any excessive battery usage on any of my cameras, which are two Nikons and a Canon.

Now, there are additional features, such as e-mail and SMS notifications, so if I'm not near my computer, I don't have to check the Eye-Fi Manager to see if my pictures have uploaded, my phone will tell me so.

It's a great product, but, please, don't buy this card with the intention that it will do what it is not advertised to do, such as create a wireless connection for your PDA, transfer RAW and movie files, send pictures back and forth between your digital picture frame and your camera. No, only JPG files, folks. And it does it flawlessly!

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars First it stumbled, then it died..., December 10, 2008

By 

Elwood P. Dowd (Carrboro, NC United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Eye-Fi Explore 2 GB Wi-Fi SD Flash Memory Card EYE-FI-2EX (OLD VERSION) (Personal Computers)

The speed with which the card arrived gave a new meaning to two-day shipping. It was ordered on 12/1, and showed up on 12/2. Kudos to Amazon and UPS.

I shot a few photos right away and was able to get them downloaded and geotagged without any trouble. This is my second Eye-fi card (yes, they can be broken), and once you accept the quirkiness of how they move photos around, it does make some sense. Also, being able to get a text message on my cell to tell me the card is finished offloading the newest images is a useful feature, I liked that.

Over the next few days I shot some more pictures, and the geotagging never worked well:

1) One set of photos on 12/4 was tagged with a location 40 miles away.
2) Another set on 12/5 was not tagged at all, even though I was well inside Skyhook's WPS coverage area (according to Skyhook's website).
3) A third set of photos on 12/6 was (oddly) partly geotagged and partly not geotagged. The tagging was accurate, but the images were all shot over ten minutes in and around a neighbor's house, and should all have gotten the same location.
4) I would tell you how the fourth set of photos was geotagged (walking around UNC's campus on 12/7), but after taking a half a dozen shots, the card just plain died. My Canon said it was unusable and locked. My Nikon said it was corrupt, but formatable. My PC could not see it at all. After formatting in the Nikon, it would immediately read as corrupted if I tried to use it in either camera.

So, my experience is that the Eye-fi Explore works just fine as an Eye-fi card, but that the geotagging is a bust: sometimes it does not work at all, sometimes it works wrong. As a bonus, the card died in just five days. I mailed everything back to Amazon yesterday.

The card was a gift. I hate having to return gifts, it's awkward.

Aside from the bad geotagging and the rapid failure, I would have given this card four stars. It still gets two, since it did function just fine as a vanilla Eye-fi card for a few days.